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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.

If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.

This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).

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(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).

Housewives aren’t the norm in the United States, but they’re not that rare, either. Liberal middle income women simply happen to be very very visible to the public, and this is the demographic least likely to stay home.

Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.